It doesn’t take much of an imagination to envision the former public defender’s office, the Groover Stewart Building at 25 Market St. in Downtown Jacksonville, converted into apartments.

The exposed brick walls that line the building’s perimeter and natural light that pours in through large windows just scream “urban chic.”

Gordon’s Castle LLC, a general contractor in Jacksonville, has put together construction plans to renovate the building into apartments, and you can click through the renderings at right that Content Design Group has created of what the apartments could look like.

Bob Knight, a broker with Addison Commercial Real Estate, has the listing for the building and has received two offers on it since the beginning of the year —with both would-be buyers wanting to redevelop the building into apartments.

The problem: Finding investors who are willing to do smaller-scale projects — and reap smaller returns on their investments. It’s next to impossible to build the large-scale, garden-style apartment projects that are popping up all over the city’s Southside in an urban environment, and mid- and high-rise construction costs are too high to justify the rents in Downtown Jacksonville.

That leaves the rehabilitation of old office buildings (which the urban core has no shortage of) into apartments as one way to build the residential base and create more density Downtown — a top priority for the newly created Downtown Investment Authority.

Farley Grainger, president of Broom, Moody, Johnson & Grainger Inc., a Jacksonville real estate appraisal firm, has tried to get a group of investors to back the apartment conversion at 25 Market St. It’s just very difficult to find that kind of capital.